Interactive television (iTV) is currently available in varying forms. The terminology used to describe the various elements within the iTV services and applications landscape is varied and a glossary of terms used herein is set forth in Appendix A. The most popular iTV offerings include:
A. TV Portals. Influenced no doubt by the analogy to popular Internet “portals” such as AOL and Yahoo, many think of a television (TV) portal as a non-video, non-broadcast, “Internet-like” page on TV. Contrary to this popular opinion, however, a TV portal is actually an application “window” into the world of interactivity that links various forms of services, including walled gardens (also known as managed content) that may contain video, text and image assets, delivered via both broadcast and narrowcast, virtual channels, interactive program guides (IPGs), enhanced TV broadcasts, video on demand (VOD) content and more. In fact, many interactive experiences can originate from the TV portal or users come into the TV portal for additional content and services. Thus, the portal may be accessed through a navigation overlay on top of regular broadcasts or through an IPG, virtual channel or enhanced programming.
Network operators, programmers and content producers have an opportunity to custom brand the content areas of TV portals, providing them with a foundation for offering interactive services and enabling new revenue streams. A portal can contain a controlled set of valuable, aggregated content and merchant sites accessible by consumers. Portal participants can consist of e-commerce providers, such as home shopping, home banking and brokerage services; various news services; weather and sports information providers; as well as advertisers, TV programmers and other content producers.
Managed content designed for a TV environment can be linked to the TV portal, forming an interactive experience that combines the convenient, audio-visually entertaining medium of TV with the immediate information access and electronic purchasing powers often seen on the Internet. The portal offers a secure environment with a common TV-centric user interface, personalization capabilities and cross-merchant shopping capabilities. Some of the key components of portal content include:                1 Basic Personalized Information—Basic on-demand information services available to end users (subscribers) are based on their preferences and/or profile, including headline news, sports news and scores, local weather, horoscopes, business news and stock quotes.        2 Branded Content—Information services in various categories include branded sources such as television networks, which may provide information and entertainment services in portals to augment their regular TV programming.        3 Shopping—“T-commerce” or “TV Commerce” includes categories such as books, video, music, gifts, electronics, apparel, travel and toys, as well as advanced shopping features such as comparison shopping, cross-merchant shopping carts and auctions.        4 Advertising—Advertising opportunities are widely available throughout the iTV landscape. Unlike Internet portals, which only provide targeted and personalized banner ads, broadband access and the rich medium of TV provide a compelling advertising vehicle, drawing consumers into a TV-centric entertainment experience that drives responses while providing the same targeting and personalization capabilities of the Internet.        5 Self-provisioning—Through a network operator's TV portal, subscribers can manage their own billing information and preferences, and subscribe to new services including premium services, e-mail, games, video on demand and more.        6 Virtual Channels—A virtual channel is a custom-branded TV channel that can be accessed from programming, the main menu or info bar, from a network operator portal, an IPG or by manually selecting a specified channel number (e.g., channel 401). Within such a channel, a TV network, advertiser or content provider can combine a video library with Internet or database content, and on-demand features enable viewers to control their interactions with the information. Thus, virtual channels allow for specific content opportunities for niche audiences, targeted advertising, brand building, and program promotions, as well commerce and subscription revenue streams.        
B. Interactive Program Guides (IPGs). The IPG is the navigation tool for TV viewing, allowing viewers to easily search for programming by time, channel, program type, and so on. It is an essential tool for iTV users, especially as the number of channels and other offerings increase. IPGs provide an opportunity for companies to offer an increasingly large amount of data in an easy-to-use interface.
C. Personal Video Recorders (PVRs). PVRs store video programming on an internal hard drive and function like a personalized video server, allowing end-users to “time shift” their TV viewing. While watching live TV, the user can “pause” and “rewind”, as well as “fast-forward” to catch up to the live broadcast. PVRs also act as autonomous agents, searching all of the available programming and building a dynamic menu of personalized content choices that the user can access at his/her convenience. Currently most PVRs are stand-alone units, developed and marketed by companies such as TiVo and Replay Networks (now Sonic Blue).
D. Video On Demand (VOD) Services. VOD is essentially server-side time shifting (vs. client-side in the case of PVRs). Users are able to play, pause and rewind videos on their TVs via their remote control. Companies such as Concurrent, Diva, SeaChange and nCube provide VOD server technology.
E. Enhanced TV Broadcasts. Enhanced TV broadcasting provides interactive content linked to video programming. A user can request information on products within ads, access additional program information, such as sports statistics, or otherwise interact with a television broadcast such as a game show. This functionality is achieved through the transmission of an interactive trigger and data sent in the broadcast channel or other mechanism along with the video broadcast. For example, ATVEF (the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum) triggers are messages that arrive at a specific point in time during a broadcast (e.g., via text channel 2 of the closed caption channel carried on line 21 of NTSC video), and are intended to activate specific enhanced content.
Enhanced TV broadcasts can be combined with other services within a unified TV portal, integrating with a walled garden or virtual channel content to leverage robust order processing, fulfillment infrastructure and revenue sharing agreements that may already in place.
F. Other Services. E-mail access, chat functions, music jukeboxes and photo albums are examples of other iTV offerings.
Many of the applications listed above will be presented to end users via a common user interface and order/transaction entry and tracking system. However, each application has specific integration, management and distribution issues that arise depending on the environment that the network operators choose to deploy and significant problems are experienced by application providers and distributors in deploying and managing their iTV applications as a result. Stated differently, application providers and distributors face problems in developing and managing their iTV applications because there exists a proliferation of technologies and standards for the delivery of iTV applications and different network operators have chosen to deploy different combinations of these technologies. For example, iTV application providers must cope with networks that have been cobbled together with different technologies such as:                a Head end technology from different providers such as Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, Harmonic, etc.        b Set-top boxes from different manufacturers such as Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, Pace, Pioneer, AOL, etc.        c Various combinations of network topologies such as cable, satellite, terrestrial, and telco, etc.        d Middleware from providers such as Liberate, OpenTV, MSTV, Canal+, Worldgate, etc.        e VOD server providers from vendors such as SeaChange, Concurrent, nCube, Diva, etc.        f Billing systems from companies such as Convergys, CSG, DST, etc.        g Conditional access systems from vendors such as NDS, Harmonic, etc.        h Differeing implementation standards such as HTML, XHTML, XML, Ecmascript, OCAP, MHP, ATVEF, DASE, etc.        i Various programming languages, such as Java, C, C++, etc.        
Content providers and application developers must navigate through this maze of often incompatible and unique combinations of the equipment, technologies and standards, and often must develop a unique and different application for each such combination that they wish to target. For their part, network operators must deploy, configure, manage and operate iTV applications on each different network configuration individually, increasing cost, complexity, and staffing needs, while reducing the number of service that can be deployed, and the quality of those services.
System operators must manage the applications within the iTV service. Middleware solutions alone allow only for a collection of applications to be deployed. There is no provision for creating a system of applications that address the following issues:                a Application validation (rights for application to deploy on the system and further the rights of the behaviors of that application; and        b High-level views of content placement opportunities across an entire system of applicantions, an example of which may be the ability for the system operator to “see” advertisement locations across an entire system of applicantons where that set of applications may have come from a multitude of sources.        
Another significant problem for the deployment of iTV applications in the United States is that the majority of in-service set-top boxes, such as the Motorola DCT1200 and DCT2000 families and the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000, Explorer 2100, Explorer 3000 and Explorer 3100 families, have relatively low power (e.g., slow clock speed) processors and a limited amount of onboard memory (both flash memory and DRAM) with which to store and process iTV applications. These set-top limitations make it very difficult to support the features, functions and viewer response times for iTV applications that are required for a compelling and rich user experience.